A major milestone for me watching Clueless throughout my teens. I recall the experiences watching it vividly. My sister came home one day with a videotape of this funny movie that her friend had recorded off Foxtel (one of Australia's two cable companies at the time). We didn't really go to movies much as children, and we were excited because we got to see something from expensive cable TV months before it came out on free-to-air TV.
Unlike my experience with Priscilla, I was able to just sit and watch along with my sister. But it was not an overly gay movie, so I could rewatch it openly. I loved the movie it was fun and witty, with a great performance by Alicia Silverstone. At the beginning, I recall laughing and going along with the basic plot, but I'm sure that I didn’t fully appreciate all the jokes. I had no idea that this was a reimagining of Emma. Like Cher, I too was clueless and was only getting a Cliffsnotes version of the movie. It was only some years after that fully understood what 'balls flying at my nose' meant.
For all the satire and one liners, I’ve found the film to be quite a lovely progressive film. Over the years, I've kept coming back to the 'Haiti' debating scene, which I love. Yes, Cher’s speech glosses over the facts, lacks nuance and comes from a point of privilege. But, at its core, it’s a lovely message of empathy and humanism. What makes me love the scene even more is while the classic ‘It does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty’ line continues to resonate in the present day, the scene extends beyond this line. It continues to preach empathy, with Travis later talking about how he feels about the Rolling Stones is about how his kids are going to feel about Nine Inch Nails, and how he should really be less harsh on his parents. As Mr Hall says, tolerance is always a good lesson. But this lesson did not come out of nowhere – it comes directly from Cher’s speech that everyone had just dismissed.
Of course, the other major impact of the film is that it informed my gay development. In particular, it had a strong female gaze. The film is uncompromisingly from Cher's perspective, clueless or otherwise. From a gay perspective, this meant that for me it was one of the first films that looked at men with desire. The film offers up studies of Christian, Murray, Elton, and of course, Josh. Unlike Priscilla which was told from the gay men’s point of view (a perspective that was too mature for me to understand), Clueless is told from the perspective of Cher. She judges males (‘ugh as if’), desires males (the slow-mo introduction of Christian by the door), and she realises that she even loves one of them (Cher’s epiphanic montage of Josh by the films end).
Like Cher, the film’s initial focus of desire is Christian.
Christian ticks off a lot of gay male stereotypes - interesting in art, well dressed and fashion conscious. From the present perspective, this may seem too stereotypical, but I don’t think it really was for a mainstream teen comedy from 1995. Even so, stereotypes can be used as a starting point, to challenge and to explore. When I look at the film closely, I think the film is quite nuanced in its depiction of Christian. Murray might call Christian a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy.
But, in fact, while Christian's a good dancer, but he isn’t shown dancing just to disco music in a gay bar. His songstress is Billie Holiday not Barbra. He is shown reading William S Burrow's Junky, not Oscar Wilde. He watches Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot and 'Sporaticus', not Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. And by the end, what Cher loves about Christian is not his shopping and dress sense, but how he wants everything to be beautiful and interesting. While I didn’t desire Christian, I think it was a revelation to me that not all gay men were those I had seen on Mardi Gras or in Priscilla.
And then there’s Josh. Cher was a surrogate for me, and Cher’s desire for Josh sparked something in me too. I remember being quite entranced by that final montage of Josh, and that final slow-motion shot of him smiling in the car. I've always loved a good end of film flashback montage; the slow-mo pace, the recall of earlier moments in the movie, now seen in a new light.
Like any good romantic comedy object of desire, Josh had some definable characteristics, but he was also a blank canvas onto which the audience could project their own fantasies. I was attracted to the fact that the was the gentle, nice, everyman guy. A do-gooder. I definitely thought he was a Baldwin, but unlike the characters in Priscilla, he was attractive in a conventional (non-threatening) sort of way.
Looking back, the film was quite a revelation for me, in that magical way that art and films can clarify things that might not be apparent in the reality of your everyday life.
While I didn’t know it at the time, I really think it was Clueless that confirmed, for one of the first times, that I could have desire for men. Priscilla suggested that that desire was sexual, but Clueless showed me that that desire was emotional too.
